Hamid Mohsin - Discontent and Its Civilizations - Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

In the media, the term “militant” is often used in describing drone casualties. The report makes clear that this blurs together two legally very different groups of people. A “militant” who is a member of the Taliban, planning to attack US troops, is not the same as a “militant” who normally herds livestock, carries a rifle, and today is sitting with other members of his clan to discuss a threat to his isolated village from a neighboring clan.

Furthermore, according to the report, the “current administration’s apparent definition” holds that any male of military age who is killed in an area where militants are thought to operate (and where, therefore, drones operate) will be counted as a militant if killed. This has allowed administration officials to make wildly unrealistic claims, disputed by even the most conservative analysts of drone casualties, that civilian deaths are “extremely rare” or have even been in “single digits” since President Obama took office.

If you disregard this novel definition and then try to ascertain what category of person was actually killed, you will arrive instead at an estimate that some 411 to 884 civilians have died in US drone strikes in Pakistan, including 168 to 197 children. These figures are from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which the authors of Living Under Drones determine to be by far the most reliable of the three main strike data aggregators (the others being the New America Foundation’s Year of the Drone project and The Long War Journal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies).

The report from the two law schools raises grave doubts about the legality of US drone strikes in Pakistan. In addition to questions around the program as a whole, specific practices are particularly troubling. These include targeting people who are not members of al-Qaeda or planning on fighting US forces in Afghanistan; so-called signature strikes, which involve attacking unknown people for gathering in groups or otherwise behaving like “militants,” rather than attacking known individuals; and the use of drones against those who try to bring aid to injured victims of drone strikes.

The report also paints a harrowing picture of the experience of the ordinary people, among the most impoverished in Pakistan, who live in the region. Witnesses repeatedly speak of how the destruction of their house, the loss of a wage-earning relative with many dependents, or the need to borrow in order to pay for the treatment of injuries has left their families destitute after a drone strike. One of the interviewees, Ahmed Jan, who told the researchers that he used to work as a driver before he was injured in a strike, “woke up in a hospital in Peshawar… and learned he needed five to six lakhs (approximately US $5,300 to US $6,350) worth of surgery to implant a rod in his leg and stop the bleeding from his nose and face. Since then, he has lost most of his hearing and the use of one foot.”

He can no longer work and relies on his sons to support his household. In his own words: “Before the drone attacks, it was as if everyone was young. After the drone attacks, it is as if everyone is ill. Every person is afraid of the drones.”

Parents report taking their children out of school because of fears for their safety, and students speak of their diminished ability to concentrate. Social gatherings have been deeply affected, with many interviewees saying that “they were afraid even to congregate in groups or receive guests in their home.” Accounts such as these, so rarely heard, serve as a reminder that the harm from the US drone campaign goes beyond the significant toll of civilian lives lost.

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PAKISTANI VIEWS of the US have grown more negative in the years of President Obama’s expanded drone campaign: 80 percent viewed America unfavorably in 2012, up from 63 percent in 2008, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. US drone attacks have likely played no small part in this deterioration. Pew found that 97 percent of Pakistanis who were aware of the strikes were opposed to them.

Perhaps as a reaction, the Obama administration has recently tried to make drone attacks more discriminating. TBIJ calculates that the minimum civilian share of drone casualties has fallen from 14 percent in 2011 to 2.5 percent in 2012. But this is likely to be too little, too late. The US drone campaign continues to bedevil US — Pakistan relations, featuring prominently in the Pakistani media and in the statements of leading Pakistani politicians.

What we have witnessed is a perverse turn of events. The US began its military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 ostensibly to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on America. Today, al-Qaeda has largely moved on from Afghanistan, and US troops there are engaged primarily in counterinsurgency operations, not counterterrorism. Counterinsurgency is also the main objective of US drone attacks in Pakistan.

But these drone attacks may well be undermining counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan itself. And this matters greatly because extremists in Pakistan pose a threat to Pakistan, to its neighbors, and to other countries, including the US. The threat is especially pronounced for the people of Pakistan, where some forty thousand have already died in a dozen years of terrorist and counterterrorist violence.

Pakistan is far too big for outsiders to police. At 180 million, its population is almost three times that of the combined total of Afghanistan and Iraq, countries where recent foreign military interventions have proved less than successful. Also, Pakistan, notwithstanding its continuing corruption and manipulation of votes, has a democratically elected government, over one hundred nuclear weapons, and an army of six hundred thousand soldiers. The country must be responsible for dealing with its own extremist groups.

Fortunately, despite its frequent inclusion on lists of failing states, Pakistan is not a basket case. It has well-established political parties, noisy private media, and an independent-minded supreme court. It ranks among the largest global producers of cotton, milk, and wheat, and has over one hundred million users of mobile phones. Between 1952 and 2012, its annual GDP growth averaged 5 percent.

The main steps Pakistan needs to take in order to improve its situation seem clear: it should strive for a lasting peace with both India and Afghanistan; confront the extremist groups who kill foreigners abroad and Pakistanis at home, including Baloch, Ahmadi, Christian, Hindu, and Shia Pakistanis; and bring about a shift in spending from defense to investment in economically productive areas such as education and infrastructure (including water and electricity, which are both severely inadequate).

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FREQUENTLY INVOKED as an explanation for the lack of progress in Pakistan is the intransigence of what is called a “deep state”—a secret, security-obsessed alliance between the Pakistani military, especially military intelligence, and militants such as the Taliban, along with extremist mullahs. Yet there are encouraging signs that the Pakistani armed forces may be changing. They recently adopted a new Army Doctrine that, for the first time, describes homegrown militancy, rather than India, as the “biggest threat” to national security. The document calls for a shift in training toward preparing for “sub-conventional” warfare against such groups instead of battling conventional armies.

Pakistani politicians, too, are showing increasing maturity. An elected government has unprecedentedly served out its five-year term, and new elections will be held in May. Despite a rocky economy and failures to improve security, parties from all the major factions have refused to back calls for a behind-the-scenes “soft coup” of the variety that has often derailed democracy in the past. Moreover, there has been improvement in relations with Afghanistan, where a groundbreaking deal for Pakistan to help train the Afghan army is being discussed, and with India, where the planned liberalization of trade and visa policies will hopefully still take place despite recent tensions between the militaries of the two countries in Kashmir.